Using labels on your Help Center articles (Guide Professional and Enterprise)

Labels are a single word or a multiple word phrase you can add to the default language version of a specific article in Help Center. You can use labels to influence article search relevance, to influence Answer Bot results (if you are using Answer Bot), or to create a list of related articles based on labels.

You can add and remove labels on individual articles or you can change labels on multiple articles at once. You must have Guide Professional or Enterprise to use article labels.

Adding and removing labels on individual articles

Labels are a single word or a multiple word phrase you can add to the default language version of an article in Help Center. You can add articles labels for multiple purposes, including to influence search and Answer Bot results or to create article lists (see Understanding why to use labels).

Click the Article settings menu at the bottom, then select Change labels.

Do any of the following:

Add a new label: Enter the label, then click Add as a new label.

Add an existing label: Search or browse to find the labels you want to add, then select any empty checkbox or any checkbox with a minus.

The minus sign () indicates that the label appears on some but not all of the selected articles. When you select it, it changes to a checkmark (), indicating that it will be added to any selected article that doesn't already have that label.

You can select multiple labels to add to the selected articles.

Remove an existing label: Search or browse to find the labels you want to remove, then deselect one or more labels.

The checkmark () indicates that the label appears on all of the selected articles. The minus sign () indicates that the label appears on some but not all of the selected articles. When you select a checkbox with a minus sign, it changes to a checkmark.; click it again to deselect the checkbox.

You can select multiple labels to add to the selected articles.

Click Change.

The label changes are applied to the selected articles.

Understanding why to use labels

Labels have the following uses and impacts:

Influence article search relevance

Adding labels can make your articles more search friendly. They are not designed to be used for fine-grained control of ranking. For example, if I have two articles about making waffles, one with the word "temperature" in the body of the article, one with the label "temperature", the labeled article will be ranked higher if a user searches for the word "temperature".

Labels are indexed for search with a bit less weight than the article title, but multiple labels with similar words can outweigh the title and body of the article. Use labels carefully as you can significantly impact the relevance of your search results and usefulness. If you are considering using labels to impact search relevance, consider that efforts to do so could end up with inferior ranking performance for your users. The best way to have your article perform well in search is to create a short and focused article, where the title and body include keywords and clearly connect to each other.

Answer Bot uses labels to influence the results it shows. It allows you to define a whitelist of articles that are allowed to be used when looking for relevant matching results. You are able to add up to ten labels that serve as an OR filter, allowing you to expand the whitelist to any articles containing any of the defined labels.

Article lists enable you to get an overview of all your published and unpublished knowledge base content, and then refine that view by using search and applying filters to build article lists. For example, you can find articles that have a specific article label, such as out-of-date.

Best practices for adding labels

Labels can help boost the search relevance of an article. However, you should use labels carefully and sparingly. It's more important to make sure the article title and body contain the relevant keywords.

Use single word labels where possible, instead of multi-word phrases

It is possible to add labels as single words or as multiple words or phrases. In general, it's more efficient to use single word labels. If you add a multi-word label, the search engine breaks it into individual words to perform the search. For example, if you have a label of "late delivery," it gets broken down into "late" and "delivery" for search.

Avoid using long phrases as labels to boost an article's ranking with respect to a query. For example, "Can I return something I ordered online to my local store." Instead, you should modify the article's title or content to make it literally relevant to the query.

Do not include variations of the same word, including different tenses or plural forms

You do not need to include multiple labels for variations of a word. For example you do not need a label for "return" and "returns" or "update" and "updated." Search stemming allows different forms of the same word to match. In particular, the singular and plural forms of a word will generally match.

Use a limited number of labels, instead of overloading an article with labels

Use labels sparingly. Adding lots of labels might actually diminish any matches on labels. This is because it is assumed that matches with a fewer number of labels beats matches with more labels. And too many labels might outweigh the relevance of the title and body.

For example, if article 1 has the labels “car,” “automobile,” and “transport” and article 2 has only the label “car,” all other things equal, if the end-user searches for “car,” the article that has only the label “car” will rank higher. That is because, as a general principle, an article that is about one specific thing is more relevant than an article about many things, when a user is looking for that one specific thing.

Note: The number of labels for search is limited to 200. The search engine will use the first 200 labels and ignore any additional labels.

Your best bet is to look at the top ranked search queries and make sure that they exist in either (but not both) the title or the labels. You don't give content an extra boost if you match a term across the title, body, labels, and comments.

Using the Help Center API to filter articles by labels

There are two ways you can filter articles by labels using the Help Center API:

There aren't any specific restrictions; we did some testing internally with different characters and lengths down to a single character without problem. Can you provide us an example of what you're running into?

I have an article where I put the label "add user" "adding user" "add" and when I search using these keywords in our help center, the articles I labeled don't even show up. A completely unrelated article actually gets listed in the result. What's up with that?

Thanks for sharing the knowledge, very useful article. I was wondering if there is some kind of average amount of labels for a successful search (I know there isn't a min. or max.). My guess is, the number of labels could be statistically related to the number of words on the article's title for a better search relevance.

I don't know of any data that indicates that there's an ideal number of labels for SEO. I would say that your best bet is to add however many labels as possible to ensure that potential search terms for your article are covered.

I have an issue whereby typos and poor grammar on the part of the person doing the search on the widget and in the subject line of the Submit a new Request is not bringing up result from our Help Centre. (I'm assuming this is an issue with labels rather than the search function itself.)

Example:

"My account" - this is a top search for us and brings up the relevant articles

"Mly account" - zero results

I would like to fix this with an "*account*" wild card that will bring up a result as long as the word "account" is in the query. The same is true for other keywords.

(As a side note, any misspelling of the word "account" will bring zero results.)

Labels do not support wild cards. In the example you provided, i'd recommend using a label for "account" rather than "my account" As a general rule, labels should be single words as they are looking for exact matches.

If you want to include common misspellings then you might consider adding those as their own labels.

I would say that's a safe assumption, however it doesn't hurt to include labels in the appropriate articles if you're confident those search terms would be used. For example, if you have a Password Reset article then it wouldn't hurt to include password as a label as it's certainly relevant to your article.

@Jay, currently there's no configuration that would prevent users from creating new labels or the ability to add clickable label options. Both are great ideas worth mentioning in our Guide Product Feedback topic for our Product Managers to review.

It would appear that either the functionality has been updated or the user that replied before was mistaken. I can't find anything in the documentation indicating if labels should or shouldn't be case sensitive, but from your screenshot, it looks like they are. I can also see case-sensitivity on my side. Zendesk themselves may be able to confirm the expected behaviour and when(if) it was changed recently.